BIG Win for Truth In Clovis Schools

A Fresno County Superior Court judge has ruled
that a lawsuit brought against the Clovis Unified School District was
justified because the District’s sex education curriculum was out of
compliance with California state law. The suit, American Academy of Pediatrics, et al. v. Clovis Unified School District,
was brought on behalf of parents, physicians and the Gay-Straight
Alliance Network by the ACLU of California and pro bono counsel, Simpson
Thacher & Bartlett LLP.

In the first-ever ruling
on California’s 2003 sex education law, Judge Donald S. Black created a
legal precedent that California students have a right to sex education
that is complete, medically accurate, and free of bias. This historic
ruling is the first to find that abstinence-only-until marriage
instruction is unlawful on the grounds of medical accuracy and bias.

“Teens
deserve complete, accurate health information, which they’ll need at
whatever point in their life they become sexually active. This ruling is
huge victory for students,” said Phyllida Burlingame, Reproductive
Justice Policy Director for the ACLU of Northern California.

In
his ruling, Judge Black ruled that “access to medically and socially
appropriate sexual education is an important public right.” The court
specifically noted that the curriculum used by Clovis Unified School
District violated the law “by failing to include the required STD and
pregnancy prevention information, by promoting and reinforcing bias in
gender and sexual orientation, and by containing medically inaccurate
information.”

The lawsuit, first filed in 2012, charged that
Clovis Unified School District was failing students and providing
misinformation that put young people’s health at risk. In a county where
teens account for nearly a third of chlamydia cases and a quarter of
gonorrhea cases, the district’s high school curriculum provided no
information about how to prevent sexually transmitted infections. It
taught abstinence as the only means of preventing pregnancy and included
a video that compared a woman who was not a virgin to a dirty shoe. In
its promotion of abstinence-only until heterosexual marriage, the
curriculum also included bias against gay and lesbian students.